Don’t Let The Government Get Its Hands On Obamacare!

A middle-aged man in a red golf shirt shuffles up to a small folding table with gold trim, in a booth adorned with a flotilla of helium balloons, where government workers at the Kentucky State Fair are hawking the virtues of Kynect, the state’s health benefit exchange established by Obamacare.

The man is impressed. “This beats Obamacare I hope,” he mutters to one of the workers.

This goes along with all the polling evidence, which says that people like the actual provisions of the Affordable Care Act, but have no idea that those provisions are in fact the substance of that terrible, tyrannical “Obamacare” program they keep hearing about. And because the insurance exchanges that are at the heart of the program will be run at the state level, with many different names, we’ll have quite a few people happily signing up for Obamacare while denouncing the program and believing it has nothing to offer them.

And I say that it’s all good.

It’s true that Democrats running in 2014 will have the extra problem that even people who are getting big benefits from the new program may not understand who to thank. On the other hand, the first and most crucial thing is to get the program up and running, with as many eligible people as possible — especially the relatively young and healthy — signing up. And Republican efforts to dissuade people from joining Obamacare will be blunted to the extent that Americans have no idea that Kynect, or Your Health Idaho, or whatever is in fact the local incarnation of the dread program.

Given all the disinformation out there, the strategy of think globally, name locally is actually a great idea. Eventually people will probably figure out that it is in fact a federal program — although maybe not, since a fair number of people apparently don’t know that about Medicare. But by the time they do, they’ll have experienced the thing’s reality, and realized that guaranteed, subsidized insurance is not, in fact, slavery.